The Impact of the IaaS Price Wars

Public cloud IaaS providers are competing heavily on price. Watching Google, AWS, and Microsoft play the falling prices game is like watching a ping-pong match. It is just a matter of time before IBM’s SoftLayer matches the prices as well. Adrian Cockcroft wrote a great piece called The Real Story Behind the Cloud Price War, …

OpFlex, Standards-Based Protocols, and Cisco’s Messaging Problem

On April second, Cisco introduced something that seems to make a lot of sense in its new declarative-based, ACI-led world of software-defined networking: a policy mechanism. The blog post about it was pretty straightforward: it included the obligatory nods toward the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and open-source communities, defined the differences between the traditional …

Cloud + DaaS Licensing May Be Better in 2014?

The DaaS (Desktop as a Service) market is maturing, and more great products are being released every day to facilitate DaaS functionality. But just like the foundation of a house affects what you can build on it, Microsoft’s unwillingness to offer VDI licensing for the desktop operating system still presents a major challenge to the …

EMC ViPR V1.1 and SRM V3.0

Server and StorageIO, @storageio The EMC2 Advanced Software Division (ASD) recently announced (more here and here) enhancements to its ViPR (v1.1) software-defined storage management solution, as well as a new version of its Storage Resource Management (SRM) product (v3.0). First, keep in mind that SRM, in the traditional server and storage world, means systems or …